Youth Soccer in the USA
Posted By BrokenClaw on August 13, 2007
For thirty years now we’ve been hearing how soccer is growing in popularity in the US. Soccer aficionados believe that youth soccer is the answer — that if kids are exposed to soccer at an early age, they’ll learn to love the game, which will carry on to adulthood. But that just isn’t the case.
Youth soccer is certainly big in the US. Most every community has a youth soccer program, with huge numbers of participants. Parents love youth soccer. The reasons why parents, particularly moms, flock to youth soccer are self-evident:
- There is relatively no chance of injury.
- There is little cost of equipment.
- There is no skill required to play.
In other countries, where kids start playing pick-up games of soccer in the streets and fields, I have no doubt that some kids develop noticeable skills by age 6 or 8. In the US, however, kids just don’t play soccer on their own. They only play it in organized leagues when their parents load them in the minivan and take them to play soccer.
And that’s the difference between soccer and other sports in the US. Youth soccer is an activity, not a sport. I’m not saying that it’s not a worthwhile activity, but it’s just an activity. Take the kids to the park, to the playground, to the pool, or to soccer. There isn’t much difference. Yes, I know there’s some instruction going on, but for the most part, a kid can stand around and run back and forth on the soccer field without ever participating in any type of athletic skill.
Conversely, a kid never gets singled out for poor play, which is related to number three above. In other sports, everyone sees when a player strikes out, or drops a pass, or makes an error, or throws the ball out of bounds, or misses a shot. In youth soccer, nobody is expected to have a particular skill, so nobody notices when no skill is demonstrated.
So then what happens? By the time kids are 10 to 12 years old, those with actual athletic skill move on to other sports where they can develop and showcase their abilities. Most of the others simply drop out of organized sports. A minority few continue to play soccer.
In the late 1980s, Boris Becker from Germany took the tennis world by storm. During one of his matches, the announcers were discussing the paucity of world-class tennis players from the US. The analyst made the point that, if Boris Becker had been born in the US, he would probably be a linebacker at a major college like Michigan, instead of playing tennis. You can say the same thing about soccer players.
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